Guest Commentary: And Another Thing....

Hey y'all. Fatcat here again, Obama and the Commie left's favorite whipping boy.

Yesterday we talked about how Obama likes to rip on fat cats to score political points. A little mouse told me, before I ate him, that Obama was not literally talking about cats. Apparently that is a term they use for businessmen and heads of banks and whatnot. Now it all makes sense! Or does it?
Okay let me try and make sense of all this. You (the government) offer banks loans to bail them out because they made dumb decisions that, for the most part you had either been strongly encouraging them or forcing them to make. Of course some of them compounded that by making a lot of stupid decisions all by themselves. These decisions, made at your behest, screwed up the world's financial system. Now you give them bailout money instead of letting them go down the drain, probably because if you did not give them the money, they would reveal just how big a role that you (the government again) helped to screw everything up.

So they make decisions you don't like and now you want to force them to, once again, abide by the political needs of the government instead of the needs of who they are really accountable to, customers and shareholders.

Meanwhile the executive branch and the army of czars have not figured out one idea that actually worked because, surprise, there is no one there that has the ear of the president who has any knowledge of how a free market system actually works!

Take some advice from a real fat cat. Get your hands off the banks, General Motors, etc. Stop buying the support of NBC through cap and trade intercourse with their parent company, General Electric. Let companies rise and fall by their own merits. The free market system works if you let it. Half a$$#d socialism only creates an economy that works at a mediocre level because no one is sure what political whim will next sweep through the system.

If anyone out there wants to blame fat cats, don't blame capitalism and don't blame me. neither one of us had anything to do with what is going on now. We have met our economic enemy and once again it's the flipping government. Oh and guess what. The inflation that is coming? That's the government's fault too! It spends too much!

Fat cat signing off!

Horse Drawn Wagons and Newspapers

A paper commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School basically says the government should step in to save the newspapers across the county. One of the nations largest newspapers, The New York Times, recently announced it is laying off additional workers as its market share contracts adding fuel to the fire that the print media needs saving. My questions; Why?

In 1900 when the automobile industry was beginning to grow I wonder if there was talk of saving the horse drawn wagon industry? After all the horse drawn wagon industry was an important part of the transportation industry and had been for many years. The horse drawn wagon manufacturers in 1900 and the Newspaper producers today are in the same position. They are in an industry that is in transition.

In 1900 the transportation industry did not go away. It evolved into motorized transport. Some of those companies that saw the change coming evolved. Consider Studebaker. Studebaker had been around since the Civil War building wagons for the US Military and at the turn of the 20th Century they realized they were not in the business of making wagons, but in the business of providing transportation products. The survived for nearly another 70 year by switching to building cars and trucks. They successfully made the transition from horse and buggy to automobiles to survive much longer than their contemporaries.

The newspaper industry is the modern horse drawn wagon industry. It does not need a bailout from the government, in fact no industry does. The first thing the newspaper industry needs to do it realize they are not in the newspaper business, they are in the news information business. Perhaps the New York Times and the Washington Post may not survive, but that is OK because somebody will take their place.

While Studebaker made the transition at the turn of the 20th Century, we also saw the rise of the replacement transportation companies like Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet. As we transition into the 21st Century we are already seeing the replacement for the newspapers in publications like The Drudge Report, Breitbart and Bloomberg.

The newspapers do not need a bailout, they need to die a natural death. In a few years a newspaper will be about as useful to a modern world as a horse drawn wagon built in a government subsidized factory.